It's News, Jim, but not as we Know it

News on the National Geographic’s website is obviously an entirely different animal from what we get on ordinary news sites. We aren’t subjected to the usual everyday tales of political misadventures, sporting dramas and various stories of death and misery from around the world.

 Instead we are given a rich selection of stories that would otherwise, at best, be given three sentences in a dusty corner of The Globe or New Yorker’s websites. The News on National Geographic’s site ranges from the huge solar storm that’s hitting earth this week to the discovery of popcorn that was prepared 6,700 years ago.

The reason I bring this up is because it’s these types of stories that lend themselves so well to multimedia convergence; clearly 15 images of a coral reef created out of sculptures of humans are going to be far more interesting than 15 shots of Mitt Romney giving a speech in Florida.

 The fine people at the helm of the Nat Geo website appear to be well aware of this, and with many of the news stories the emphasis is on pictures and video more so than text. 

The daily news section of the website is separated into a dozen links under headings such as: ‘Animals’, ‘Travel/Cultures’, ‘Space/Tech’ and ‘Weird’. Though all of these links lead to stories that are complete with audio visual content, there is a separate link entitled ‘News Photos’ and another dedicated solely to ‘News Videos’.

 What Nat Geo have done is find themselves an interesting niche between newspaper and magazine; essentially providing a roundup of news and current events in the style of the news website - but focusing heavily videos and images in the style that’s normally associated with a magazine’s site.

The system used for scrolling through the photos is a pleasure to use, rest your clicker over the image for an instant and a brief summary of the content emerges. In this age of the severely stunted attention span potential readers want to decide whether their interested or not at a glance. Also the news videos come without text, which can be nice change from the veritable assault of information we’re used to.